Set in the world of London theater in the mid-1880s, Topsy-Turvy (1999) tackles the creative partnership between W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the reigning kings of light operetta, at a turning in their career. Their work has become repetitive, their latest show a disappointment, and the partnership is under strain as composer Sullivan (Allan […]
Cloud Atlas (2012) wants nothing for ambition. Jumping between six distinctive stories in six different eras, with a cast that plays different (yet connected) parts in the various storyline, it’s at once literal and evasive, a film that wears its heart on its beautifully stitched sleeve and its meaning in its design and yet finds […]
Enchanted April (1991) – Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson are the two quietly miserable middle class wives who impulsively (and passionately) decide to escape their dreary world in post-World War I London and their distracted, pompous husbands and rent a castle on the Italian coast. When they wake up in their villa after a rainy […]
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Japan, 2017), the magical fantasy by Japanese animator and filmmaker Hiromasa Yonebayashi (director of the marvelous When Marnie Was There), based on a children’s novel by British author Mary Stewart, follows the adventures of a schoolgirl who receives magical powers for a day from a magical flower that blooms once […]
There is indeed a spy in London Spy (2015) but this BBC mini-series is not a traditional espionage drama. Danny (Ben Whishaw) is a club-culture young gay man with a dreary day job who meets the closeted, emotionally suppressed Alex (Edward Holcroft), a genius with numbers but awkward with people. He’s an investment banker who […]
Nicholas Nickleby (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) (2002) – You can’t fault Douglas McGrath for his ambition. Determined to bring Charles Dickens’ 900 page semi-autobiographical novel to the screen, he condenses, chops, and briskly skips through what’s left of a dense pattern of improbably colorful characters, and still winds up with a Dickens of a tale. The […]
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) – The beloved C.S. Lewis adventure fantasy, about a quartet of English children who pass through the wardrobe of an English manor during World War II and emerge in a land of magic and danger had been adapted for TV in Britain but […]
A couple of Thanksgivings ago, as the family hung out the few hours before dinner, my brother and I started telling my dad why he would like Hot Fuzz (2007), a film that otherwise doesn’t appear to be his cup of English tea. It was from the guys who made Shaun of the Dead and […]
